Client: Liverpool City Council, 2022

Challenge:

Liverpool Council’s vision is to become a financially sustainable and resilient council with a strong culture of financial management, accountability and evidence-based decision-making across the organization supporting the delivery of key strategic outcomes, priorities and sustainable services. It has set key changes and improvements to be delivered through the Council’s Finance Improvement Plan (FIP).

Impact:

Working collaboratively with our Liverpool City Council colleagues, Inner Circle Consulting investigated the Council’s existing processes for collecting income, understanding the key challenges and working to overcome these.

Building on an in-depth research and analysis of best practice and developing a framework for service improvement, we are developing a delivery model for risk management and internal audit that will enable the Council to accelerate improvements in these areas.

We are supporting the Council to make sure the required tools are in place to build a strong financial planning process that results in a realistic budget and enables a “whole Council” response, and an improved procurement service that delivers on social value and raises the bar on contract management.

We are working with all Council departments to strengthen control and oversight of service delivery companies, making sure they deliver value for money and quality services, and that there are robust performance monitoring processes in place.

We are looking into the Council’s existing financial systems to understand the main challenges and support implementation of new systems that underpin the Council’s strategic objectives, ensuring redundant processes are automated and that data is generated and managed more efficiently.

We are providing project management support across the workstreams of the FIP ensuring that robust foundations are in place to achieve the programme’s ambitious objectives.

We are developing a comprehensive communication and engagement plan to be delivered in parallel to the FIP priority workstreams, to ensure that finance becomes everyone’s business.

We met individually with the local authorities to build a relationship and ensure all voices were heard early in the process.

We then designed a series of data-driven workshops to interrogate the current challenges and opportunities in the region, define the knotty challenges that were best addressed together rather than apart, and agree the enabling resources required to carry out the vision through to 2050.